How about special bonus damage against shields in addition to whatever other changes seem apt.

+1

+1 to improved damage
+1 to energy reduction
+1 to even MORE damage against shields

personally, I think about 4 of these should easily take out a queens shield. so double or quadruple the damage. they are so hard to hit things with, should have PLENTY of damage to make up for it.

It doesn't matter if 4 of them can take out a queen's shield if none of them hit because the queen moves around so much.

I really don't think they need more damage. They already do enough damage to insta-kill any fighter in the game and severely damage most heavier ships.

hmm... have not tried yet, but from everybody's complains and suggestions, I proposed

Avalon mk.2 (EMP)
Similar to regular Avalons in everything EXCEPT the damage, mk.2 should do half the damage to hulls, but quadruple damage against shields.

Alloh, if its only gonna do twice the current damage against shields, then make it so its easier to hit ships w/ as well... should be *easier* and/or *more effective* then chaos currently is...

It doesnt have to be easier, but it should be more effective then chaos swarms. At the moment it's neither.

so:

-increase effectiveness of avalons against shields
-should be harder to use than chaos (how much harder though?)

This should be far down on the list but, seeing as avalons/screamers seem to run partially on energy and create crazy ass plasma balls of death I'd like to see them have a EM effect where when very close to the centerpoint of the explosion your ship would be disabled/no enery regen for a very short period of time with residual radar effects from the hull of the ship being charged...

Screamers do really need this Avalons less so, but it would make sense, plasma, em fields ect...

And by short period It should scale on proximity and/or total damage absorbed in the say something like if you're within 20% of the total prox of the explosion you'd lose all control *complete disable* of your ship for 0.5 seconds with the energy regen effects lasting another 2 seconds with and the radar crapping out for another 4~5 secs losing energy regen/radar telemetry could be done at 40% of the splash and 60% respectively, all effects would scale down from the maximum affected time to 0 depending on proximity/damage.

*edit*As far as avalons are concerned they're perfect as they are now, missle stacking should remain the main technique for dropping shields since they make the bomber vulnerable and require the right amount of coordination, avalon torps are perfect for stripping turrets and preventing fighters from repairing/taking defense near capships IMHO their current stats are just fine.

I dont think it should be harder to use then chaos swarms against capital ships. If it is, we'll just keep using chaos swarms, and avalons will stay as rarely used toys like TU mines.

Making them do extra damage to shields, along with some other weapons would be cool. along those lines, some weapons should be able to pass through shields, would be a cool buff to rails.

As for giving them some infinitesimal amount of homing, i believe Incarnate said something a good 4 years ago to me about considering something like that for rail guns, to solve the angle issue. I'd say give them enough to correct maybe a 10 meter inaccuracy over the course of 2km. Rails on the other hand, maybe 1 meter over the same distance

10 meters over 2km would do barely anything... not worth the devs implementing if its that low.

Crusader, if you aim perfectly at a completely stationary target from too far away, your orientation data that is sent over the network will have enough rounding error to throw off the aim. That is what LNH is talking about compensating for. Not so much a "Make avalons better" suggestion as a "Make the game not ruin my aim quite as badly due to using low precision numbers" suggestion.

^^^^^ THIS ^^^^^
Thank you Pizzasgood for getting the point I was trying to make. Homing isn't to make them easier to use. It's to make them usable.

The problem ask see it not with rails or avalons, rather with the aiming recticle. Any weapon using any type of sight has to be zeroed for a certain distance, i.e., you have to change the sight orientation to compensate for the distance (in a gravity environment that means for say..an m16a6, at 500m the bullet will drop x amount, so you raise the sight be a corresponding amount so your "aim" is actually higher then straight line). In vo, it is assumed that when you fire an unguided weapon /aa off round the 'bullet" will follow down the direct centre of the sight picture. This is false, in VO the centre recticle is virtually useless for fine aim, as the weapon actually fires straight down the line of its port in orientation towards the recticle at an unknown intersect. when rail killing stationary bots at 1500m in a vulture (for example) you actually have to aim a bit "above" the target to compensate. The same thing goes for avalons, with enough practice it is possible to aim them reliably over a distance, especially at something as big as connie or hac. A trident or a teradon on the other hand, is quite a different matter, and i personally don't think avalons are intended for "small" targets to begin with. Before adding homing, id suggest people practice with them for an extended period (and hopefully when they are more available) to get a better idea of something being "impossible" or not.

ender, Vendetta uses numbers that take up less space to store weapon orientation information in order to use less network bandwidth. This has the side effect of making weapon orientation less accurate than it should be. It's fairly easy to notice the adverse effects of this when using rails or flares over a distance greater than 1000m.

Yeah it's not a problem with the aiming reticle. If the reticle was off, it would be consistently off and you could compensate for it like a gun with a bent sight. This is a margin of error in floating point numbers. For a good example, try firing avalons at a station turret from 3000m away at a dead stop. Zoom in with 'i' and fire, notice the rocket will not usually fly directly at your target even if the reticle is right on it. Move to a different place and fire again, it will be off again, but at a different angle.

i haven't tried avalons much (though I've had no problems with hitting caps while moving thus far, but i don't try at 3000m either way), but with rails i am able to compensate at distances, i always chalked it up to a sloppy HUD design, granted rails top out at 1500m, so anything beyond that isn't worth trying anyway.

Hitting moving capships with them isn't that hard. Stacking avalons to de-shield one and hitting it with all 8 of them is what's hard.

and also maybe include a "mini avalon" for the small port?

So, one of the reasons for the delay of bringing back Avalons was my holding out for an "improved" avalon that worked a bit differently. I intended to:

- Make them minimally guided (they would miss if the target moved much).
- Give them a long lifespan.
- Make their speed relatively slow.

The ramifications of this would be a torpedo with a very low absolute top speed (non-additive), but one that would not be impacted by the small variations in direction due to angular quantization.

I also wanted it to be targeted by ship turrets, as you may recall, but that was more time technically involved than I had hoped.

Damage against shields is definitely something that would make the weapon more worthwhile. Maybe we can look at that next week.. but I'm not sure how significant of a development undertaking that would be. If it's non-trivial, I'm likely to prioritize a few other things first.